Microsoft had a press event in New York on Tuesday and unveiled the Surface Pro 3, and the line they kept repeating on stage was "the tablet that can replace your laptop." Panos Panay said some version of that sentence about six times during the demo, which is usually a sign that a company is trying pretty hard to convince you of something.
The specs are genuinely impressive on paper. Bigger screen this time, 12 inches instead of the old 10.6, running at 2160x1440. Its thinner too, 9.1mm, which is thinner than the MacBook Air I'm typing this on right now. Weighs 800 grams. The kickstand now goes to basically any angle you want instead of the two or three fixed positions the older ones had, and they redesigned the pen so it magnetically parks on the side instead of you losing it in a bag somewhere (I have lost every stylus I've ever owned within a month, so I'm skeptical this fixes anything, but fine).
Pricing starts at $799 for the base Core i3 model with 64GB of storage, and climbs all the way to $1,949 if you want the Core i7 with 512GB and 8GB of RAM. Preorders opened right after the event and it ships June 20th.
Here's my problem with it though, and its not really a hardware problem. The Type Cover, the keyboard part, the thing that makes this a laptop instead of a tablet with a kickstand, is sold separately. Its another $129.99. So that $799 starting price everyone's writing headlines about isn't actually the price of the thing they're claiming replaces your laptop. Its the price of a tablet that replaces your laptop once you also buy the accessory that makes it a laptop. Apple gets dragged constantly for a la carte pricing and I do it too, but this one's worth calling out because the entire pitch of the device hinges on it being a laptop replacement, and the laptop part costs extra.
I've used a couple of the earlier Surface Pros, borrowed one from a friend for about a week last year, and my actual complaint isn't really about the hardware at all, its Windows 8. The tile interface still feels like two operating systems stapled together depending on whether your finger or a mouse is currently touching the screen, and no amount of thinner bezels fixes that. Maybe Windows 8.1 Update smooths some of it over, I haven't spent enough time with the newest build to say for sure. But I sat there watching the keynote clips and kept thinking the hardware team at Microsoft is doing genuinely good, ambitious work, and the software team keeps handing them something that undercuts it.
Compare that to what I do with the Air. I close the lid, I open it later, everything's exactly where I left it, and I've never once had to think about which "mode" I'm in. That sounds like a small thing to care about but its the thing I actually notice every single day, way more than screen resolution or how many millimeters thick something is.
None of this means the Surface Pro 3 is a bad piece of hardware. If you're the kind of person who takes handwritten notes constantly, the pen with pressure sensitivity and the flat writing angle from that adjustable kickstand sounds like a legitimately nice setup, better than anything Apple's shipping right now since they don't even make a stylus. Architects, designers, people who sketch, I can see this being the first tablet that actually replaces a legal pad for them.
I'm just not convinced its replacing anyone's laptop yet, not at $930 all-in once you add the keyboard, not running an OS that still asks you to context-switch between two different visual languages depending on what app you opened. Maybe Surface Pro 4 gets there. Maybe by then Windows will feel like one coherent thing instead of a compromise. I'll believe the tagline when I see someone actually ditch a laptop for one of these and not complain about it three weeks later.
For now mine stays a MacBook Air, and my stylus collection, wherever those pens ended up, stays lost.